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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24890278">Cats Have Nine Lives (discontinued until further notice)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolframj/pseuds/wolframj'>wolframj</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band), 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, F/M, Filipino Character, Past Abuse, Pining, Sexual Tension, Smut, Suicide Attempt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 01:14:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,060</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24890278</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolframj/pseuds/wolframj</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Min Yoongi by now has mastered the art of taking the easier way out. He sticks to what’s familiar and less bothersome in the long run, but unresolved matters have always found a way to be known, one way or another. It all comes crashing after eight years down the road with a ghost of his past in the guise of graceful skirts, honey-gold eyes, and a tongue sharper than his own.</p><p>Whether she was his version of karma or the symbol of his self-redemption, he hasn’t figured it out yet.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Min Yoongi | Suga/Original Female Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Cats Have Nine Lives (discontinued until further notice)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>originally wanted to keep this going, but kinda fell out of love with it. i'll just keep it here in case i get to writing it again. idk if it actually suffices as a one shot but that will do for now i guess...</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>[ WHEN THE LINES OVERLAP ]</b>
</p>
<p><b>          THE CLOCK </b>strikes twelve, and instead of a princess losing her shoe, a man is close to losing his mind.</p>
<p>          Death wishes in the form of incoherent mumbles and mint chewing gum breath blow past his lips. Clad in black down to his soles, he trudges heavy steps onto the cobblestone. Tonight was exceptionally cold and his thin button-up doesn't do him any justice.</p>
<p>          It's true – people do tend to find their birthdays less significant the more years have gone. Min Yoongi, passing his 27th, had the slightest of smiles.</p>
<p>          <em>Just a small gathering</em>, they said; <em>you'll have fun</em>, they said.</p>
<p>          The torture chamber of a friend's house he barely escaped from was not the most ideal of places for small gatherings that were in fact, not that small at all. As Kesha's Cannibal blast from the speakers, strangers lose their inhibitions and he's glued to the worn-out sofa right in the middle of the ruckus. With a bottle in his hand and his mind in the clouds, he lives in fast motion as people go over, sit beside him, then go. Occasional social interactions passed off as polite — albeit <em>forced</em> because some of them haven't even heard of his name until tonight — birthday greetings that went in one ear and then out of the other. Hell, a couple even had the audacity to blatantly make out like he wasn't there, and it was the sound of a belt buckling that threw him off his tipping point and up the couch.</p>
<p>          Thank Jesus, the booze was good enough to become the sole redeeming factor in this party. He even got buzzed enough to present himself at the beer pong table. However, it was somewhere in between game rounds where nerves were struck and doors were slammed that made him wish he had just stayed on the damn sofa.</p>
<p>          Min Yoongi isn't a sore loser. Beer pong wasn't the Olympics. He wasn't teetering on a thin line between life and death, nor was he bringing home a million-dollar check if the gods decided to be on his side for once. But the bitter aftertaste of beer spoiling his tongue could not compare to the taste of defeat. Especially, when a distant memory buried for almost a decade was wrenched out from six feet under the dirt, and the others were just too far gone to realize that it wasn't funny anymore. It tore him apart at the seams, inside and out, until the wounds cut too deep; wounds that he thought had been mended by a concoction of alcohol and his tears because time could pass but his guilt will never leave him. The memory takes him under, and he drowns willingly.</p>
<p>          Min Yoongi <em>is</em> exhausted. He's drunk and stumbling, bordering on unconscious and flat on the ground, but he remains steady (or at least he attempts to) on his tracks for the most part, determined on arriving home in one piece. That was until he finds himself stopping because that very memory has haunted him long enough until it's manifested right in front of him: a bright neon sign in the distance — bright enough to sting.</p>
<p>          Beaming against the fluorescent is neon pink cursive, the words <em>'Day Spa &amp; Nail Salon'</em> blinding. Its presence, though expected, still catches him off guard. In fact, it even taunts him and he questions why —<em> just why</em> — it still had to be open at this hour, within the self-contained plane of his existence that coincides with him taking a different route home, while in a vulnerable disposition that makes him think out loud and wear his heart on his sleeve?</p>
<p>          Fueled by burning yet unanswerable questions, he finds himself edging closer to the lone entity shining in the thick of nightfall, as an entranced moth would to a light bulb.</p>
<p>          Then he catches it — the swift movement of the sign hanging against the glass door, flipping from 'OPEN' to 'CLOSED' right at the very second he makes his presence known.</p>
<p>          Then he catches <em>her</em>  — the culprit, red-handed, beyond the translucent barrier. She casts an ethereal glow, fluorescent white beaming against her silhouette. Yoongi, tongue in between teeth, stands stupid and silent at the personification of his intoxicated afterthoughts. He believes that she was a mere hairbreadth close to becoming just another vivid hallucination. But she's there in flesh and bone. She's there with hair that reflects the midnight sky; framing her gentle face, gliding along her humble breasts and ruffling in light curls just above the rim of her skirt. He lingers a second too long at the mischievous ring of light caramel skin at her hips, where her knotted shirt cuts off too short and her skirt rests too low to conceal it. </p>
<p>          She's real and out to damn him, no matter how unaware of it she may be. And even after eight years down the line, his heart breaks a little bit more at the sight of her, his greatest devastation, his sweetest downfall — <strong>Aira. </strong></p>
<p>So he asks <em>why?</em> to the stars; to those that dust the dark blanket looming over their heads, and to those that found a home in her eyes. He asks each and every one of them: <em>why?</em></p>
<p>          When those starry eyes flickered of familiarity, for a second, they were teenagers again; innocence idly dwindling through fluttering stomachs and smiles that meant something else. But when she glowers, fingers tapping the laminated bond paper against the glass to avert his attention, he's pinned down by a stare heavy of resentment, twin balls of fire so cruel they put the sun to shame.</p>
<p>
  <em>          "Closed."</em>
</p>
<p>          Her voice echoes an iceberg's last breath, as if the printed characters on the makeshift sign weren't enough on their own. Yoongi pictures ice shards puncturing through the glass at her dismissive tone, and chills run down his nape knowing that he's a long wanted target. </p>
<p>          But he isn't one to back down. He knows better than that; he knows her better than that.</p>
<p>          Dry lips purse together, gathering thoughts and filtering through plausible word combinations that will hopefully not fuck this up for him. His footsteps upward tiled steps mimicked the anxious tremors of his heart, but his eyes never waver from hers. He ignores the door clicking locked at his presence and jabs a forefinger to the surface that separates them; she doesn't even flinch.</p>
<p>          "It wasn't two seconds ago."</p>
<p>          A deeper frown morphs her features. Aira's eyes narrow apprehensively; the intrusion of his finger instantly becoming a threat in her line of sight. She burns holes to the glass with the firm intention of grazing his fingertip. Yoongi was sure that if he were any closer, then he would hear the fire crackle within the heart that beats earnestly, thriving on hot lava than blood. However, at a certain distance, he's an unwanted guest; an uninvited audience to the <em>pas de deux</em> of the embers in her irises — a performance too heart-wrenching for him to bear yet too haunting, too <em>beautiful</em>, to set his gaze away from. He wonders if the darker swirls in his irises also dance like hers, and if they were, was she watching them, too?</p>
<p>          He digresses when she speaks, and he can't tell whether it was the flames in her eyes that grew or the door that frosted all over happened first.</p>
<p>
  <em>          "Too bad."</em>
</p>
<p>          The door blinds shut close. Yoongi then faces his barely-there reflection, his look of utter stupidity and drunken stupor.  But when the gears and cogs begin turning, it is when he pats his pockets for his wallet.</p>
<p>          He taps the leather on the glass with persistence.</p>
<p>          "I'll pay!"</p>
<p>          As if he has uttered the unspoken secret code, the blinds flip open and she looks at him expectantly.</p>
<p>          "Double," he rasps lowly, not missing a beat.</p>
<p>          Aira blinks once. She observes him curiously, still ever so careful. Though the flames don't dissipate and the ice remains solid, a sense of relief washes over him, as if the way her stare held his own was rather out of caution than spite; as if it meant that the past was in the past, no one held any grudges, and she was just looking out for herself.</p>
<p>          At least, that's what he wanted to believe.</p>
<p>          The truth of the matter is that nothing has changed. She still looks at him like he was the bane of her existence, and that she has every right to do so. The only difference was the brown leather in his hand, seemingly reaching out to her through the glass. In her sudden rumination is the thought of keeping the money for herself. Tips are rare jewels, customers are assholes, and it has been three hours since closing time.</p>
<p>          Yet she was still apprehensive. She searches for clip-on microphones, hidden cameras, and people lurking at a distance, getting ready to scream 'you just got punked!'  because <em>never would</em> any of Min Yoongi's carbon copies scattered among the multiverses have the audacity to stand at her doorstep for just a friendly visit. He was a coward, and he was dead to her as such; a ghost of the past who took his sins to the grave. </p>
<p>          Then at that moment, it dawns on her. Never would she sleep in on the job, never would she close up late, and especially, never would she open up the door for him ever again. Yet she already broke two out of the three, without realizing it until now, and those mistakes have led her to where she is — on the brink of breaking the last. It dawns on her that the universe truly was the ultimate prankster, bending and twisting realities like strings. <em>Maybe</em> it wouldn't matter if they avoided one another like the plague. Maybe it wouldn't matter if they went as far as designing a map of routes that wouldn't lead them to each other. Because <em>maybe</em> the unforeseeable reality bound to make their paths cross would still occur at one point or another. It could have happened when she was 19 on her budding legality, or maybe when she's already 35 at her wedding reception. But their realities intersect at this very moment when she's sleep-deprived at 24, while he's drunk and just blossomed into 27, and they both walk unknowingly into the bear trap. </p>
<p>          <em>Maybe</em> this <em>was</em> just a coincidence, a mere flaw in the system, and it didn't have to mean anything else more than that.</p>
<p>          So she acquiesces, letting go of her last 'never-would' when she unlocks the door, and a whiff of acetone and her sweet corner store-bought cologne invades Yoongi's senses all at once.</p>
<p>           "What do you want?"</p>
<p>          At first, he listens, her words chime as clear as day now without the glass separating them. Then, he just stares. He drinks in the clearer sight of her slender figure, skin kissed by moonbeams. Honey and gold — he's reminded as the color of her eyes. Beneath the ice crystals and dancing embers ignited by past mistakes and broken promises, she was all <em>honey and gold.</em> Yet somehow he knew that if he caved and closed the distance with three measly footsteps, it would all still be so far from reach; he wouldn't taste the honey nor the gold because the smooth supple skin at her hips would scorch his palms, and the touch of her tongue would numb the crevices of his teeth and send his brain spiraling into a frozen wasteland.</p>
<p>          Though they would be so physically close, somehow she would still be so far away.</p>
<p>          Yoongi's heart was slipping and he catches it before she could see it in his eyes. He falls back to his blank façade, finds his composure, and musters enough courage to face her.</p>
<p>          "This <em>is</em> a nail salon, right?"</p>
<p>          "Last time I checked," Aira nonchalantly nods. "We got acrylics, wax, the full-on mani-pedi package... foot massages if you're into tha–"</p>
<p>          "A manicure then," Yoongi blurts.</p>
<p>
  <em>          ...and a bit of your time.</em>
</p>
<p>          As the choir of cicadas hums their lullabies, little did they know that the neon sign would not only spark a conversation but even reignite an old flame that the two once had.</p>
<p>          They were just too high up in their pedestals, crowned with pride and their ego, dousing their hearts with ice-cold water before anything could happen.</p>
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